The arrogance of Conroe City Council

Published
4:56 pm CDT, Thursday, May 21, 2015

To the editor:

Like many area residents, I was stunned at first but not shocked by the arrogant actions of the Conroe City Council in considering even more annexations of areas that most assuredly do not want to be annexed. After establishing a city defense fund of $50,000 to fight the lawsuit brought by residents against the annexation, the City Council now wishes more of this on people who do not need their wasteful governance. Are they going to allow a vote by these residents?

Are the current citizens of Conroe proud of these undemocratic actions? Shouldn’t alarm bells be going off in the minds of voters as to why after the lawsuit was brought, this sudden annexation was proposed? Coincidence? It doesn’t take a detective to see two things:

1. These are speculative real estate deals driven by builders and lawyers who want the city to increase the ever-dreaded taxes and traffic by bringing in neighborhoods. The residents of the lake may like more business and employment, but not massive new development that is unplanned for and poorly managed. There is no need to build 1,000-house developments without improving the roads in our area first.

2. It should be clear to all that Conroe is not as confident about the outcome of the lawsuit as its city attorney seems to think. This reeks of a scared, rushed plan to stop the lawsuit. Also, I am not even sure whether the city is allowed to buy real estate owned by a state-established agency — the San Jacinto River Authority — without state approval.

Hold your state reps’ feet to the fire on this point. If our state representatives are worth our continued support, they need to oppose any future annexations in the lake area or be held accountable by voters. No matter what happens, the voters will alter the political landscape to prevent our area from becoming a captive of a few narrow parochial interests and their collective wallets.

Robert Wesley Coats

April Sound

The people have spoken on road bond

To the editor:

Several weeks ago, many of us who are representative of the silent majority pleaded with commissioners not to pass the $350 million patchwork road bond because of what we felt was a significant misallocation of resources within it.

We gave them the reasons why - only 40 percent of the bond was geared toward mobility, representative primarily of the South Montgomery County Mobility plan. Unfortunately, 60 percent was pork, split between $79 million in maintenance and operations (which we already pay taxes for and could be construed as double-dipping) and the rest in special-interest favors, including Woodlands Parkway and Research Forest extensions.

A record-setting 28,000 voters turned out to vote May 9, and clearly 16,000 (58 percent) were against it. It was a landslide against the bond. While roughly 10,000 (out of 12,000-plus) voted against the bond in The Woodlands area, 6,000 outside of The Woodlands also voted against it.

County Judge Craig Doyal and Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley said throughout the campaign that the bond was needed and wanted in Precinct 2. However, the voters of Precinct 2 turned it down with 51.4 percent voting against it. Precinct 3 defeated it overwhelmingly at 73.7 percent. And Precinct 4 passed it by a single digit with 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent. It was clear that the voters not only in The Woodlands and Precinct 2 sided with us, so did Precinct 4, by-and-large.

In tallying up 4 separate campaign finance reports, we see that special interests spent over $1 million to get both the judge and Riley elected to push this and future bonds through. And it still didn’t work. While we desperately have critical infrastructure requirements, we’ll never meet the $1.5 billion in needs just in South County by this wasteful approach.

Once again, we ask that you listen to we the people. And that is, we ask that you move posthaste on the priority of projects that are listed in the South County mobility report immediately and complete the H-GAC countywide thoroughfare plan currently in the works by this August to address the rest of the needs in the county.